Yvonne Hume's Art History 411 Blog

This week’s reading is an analysis of French art philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s use of phenomenology in art history by Amelia Jones. The essay begins with a painting that portrays a woman’s genitals as the primary subject matter. The painting was created by Gustave Courbet in 1866 and entitled The Origin of the World . It shocked the world because it only shows the woman’s thighs, torso, part of a breast, and hairy genital. It is different than any other high art female nude painting created during that period and even now. The title gives away what the artist was thinking when he created the painting. However, the painting was commissioned by Turkish diplomat Kahil Bey. The painting stirred up a slew of questions among art critics. Such as, how does an interpreter engage with visual images? What kind of bodies does a viewer experience when hovering over the subject? Who produced the visual image and what does the visual image mean?   Amelia Jones asserts that the subject...

       This week’s reading is written by a Vietnamese-American video artist named Trinh T. Minh-ha. She writes about feminism, racism within feminism, European colonialism in South Africa, and the cycle of oppression.       Minh-ha, being born in America and feeling American on the inside but looking oriental on the outside, seemed to have experience attention based on her differences. I think that many Americans feel this way. Many of us are different but are not always treated like Americans because we look or act differently than what the general population expects. This is why what Minh-ha writes about in this essay is incredibly relatable to me. I like Minh-ha’s statement: “difference is awkwardness or incompleteness.” This spoke to me on so many different levels. When one is different, you feel awkward, as if you do not belong. Even though you absolutely are not different on the inside. You were born here and in fact, your ancestors came to ...

  The Death of the Author written by Roland Barthes is an essay that asserts when one reads a piece of writing that the reader enters into birth and the author dies. Historically, people have had to find out everything about an author or an artist to attempt to understand the work that they produced. This is why there are so many biographical books on artists, such as Van Gogh, Tchaikovsky, and Baudelaire. According to Barthes, there is great importance put on the author’s life, his taste, and his passions.   Because of the nature of capitalism, it attaches importance to the author. Otherwise, how would one sell its work and capitalize on it?  When reading this essay, the author that came to my mind is the famous French author, Alexandre Dumas. He wrote books like The Three Musketeers , The Count of Monte Cristo , and The Man in the Iron Mask . Dumas had much success in his writing career. Dumas became accustomed to a lavish lifestyle from the royalties of the books ...

This week’s reading gave me a different perspective on how black females are represented on film and what they feel when they are watching a film in a world that is dominated by white males. The essay is written by Bell Hooks, she begins talking about the terror she felt when she was a child and told not to stare. Historically, white slave owners punished black people for looking. They were denied their rights to gaze and to look. Hooks goes on to talk about the conflict she felt inside when her mother told her to look at her when she is talking to her and how she was afraid to look. There is much power in looking. I can attest to that statement. When I was a child growing up in a small rural town in Georgia, I remember other children getting really mad at me for staring at them. The town I grew up in was predominately black so it would always be another black classmate I was looking at. But I was not looking at them because of race. I did not care about skin color. I looked becau...

       This week’s reading, written by Laura Mulvey,   is about an obsession with the human form and pleasure in looking. According to one of Freud’s theories, scopophilia is a component of sexuality that drives independently of the erotogenic zones. In other words, by looking at something, the human form, it can invoke a sexual state.   I thought about this concept and I can see how men in particular are visual beings. They are visually stimulated by the female figure. When the human figure is exaggerated in certain key parts a spectator can have pleasure looking at the figure.   At the same token, I believe women enjoy being looked at and are turned on when they feel that they are sexy (I am only speaking for myself and personal experience). And so it can be this give and take relationship where the men are gazing and women are the passive sexual object.        One of the very first persons that I thought about when reading this a...